Winner of the Landerneau Prize for Crime Fiction: "A combination of a South American Western and a noir [with] airs of Faulknerian tragedy" (Lire).
By the time Rafael is born, the family farm has already gone to hell. Rafael's father has abandoned them. His older twin brothers blame Rafael for their father's departure and exact revenge. Rafael's other sibling is a simpleton whose affections and allegiances change with the shifting winds. And ruling over this dysfunctional roost is a tyrannical and avaricious mother.
On the lonely Patagonian steppe, life is lived to the rhythms of the family farm. But there is nothing bucolic about the existence described in these pages: it is ruthless, unforgiving, and bloody. As the family tensions mount, daily life degenerates into open warfare, in a gripping, unsentimental, ultimately majestic story about life in one the most inhospitable places on Earth.
Fans of Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner will enjoy this story of lonely Patagonian farm life taking a violent turn, translated from Spanish by Alison Anderson.
Praise for Nothing But Dust
"A combination of a South American Western and a noir, Nothing But Dust has airs of Faulknerian tragedy in full Argentinian heat. A vicious circle
of cruelty and redemption, written with complete austerity."
-Lire
"[Sandrine Collette] has a gift. The gift to lose herself in unknown,
inhospitable lands and, as if by magic, to bring forth from them the harshest
bitterness and the most firmly hidden beauty."
-L'Express
"A claustrophobic drama placed in a setting both hostile and sublime."
-Biblioteca Magazine
"The novel's descriptions of nature are at times exalted, at others coldly
descriptive-but in spite of the severity that dominates the setting, in Collette's
prose, the young Rafael is a radiant hero."
-Télérama
